Heller McAlpin
Heller McAlpin is a New York-based critic who reviews books regularly for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications.
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Emma Straub's new novel is a charmer that unleashes the magic of time travel to sweeten its exploration of some heavy themes like mortality, the march of time, and how small choices can alter a life.
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Novelist Ann Hood, whose Fly Girl paints a picture of her time as a flight attendant, was a beneficiary of the fight by the women profiled in Nell McShane Wulfhart's book to be treated professionally.
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By exploring binaries such as imagination versus reality and surface versus depth — with their often blurred boundaries — Ali Smith's latest challenges readers to embrace the indeterminate.
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The question overshadowing Amy Bloom's memoir is how far you'd be willing to go for the one you love. Would you agree to help your beloved end his life when he receives a hopeless diagnosis?
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Manguso made a name for herself in minutely observed memoirs. Now she uses fiction to write about what it is to feel poor, poorly nurtured, and inadequately loved in a class-conscious town.
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Phyllis Fischer, a 40-year-old wife and mother, is drawn into a liberating relationship with a much younger man. She soon realizes that perhaps she wasn't so content as she thought.
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Most readers spend a lot of time happily immersed in words. But for a change of pace, these gorgeous art books provide hours of blissful visual diversion.
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Lily King's first story collection demonstrates her range, pulling you in and making you wonder where she's going, whether it's a brutal encounter between former roommates or a sudden act of kindness.
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The writer and artist Tamara Shopsin takes a fond look at the past in her new novel, set at the famous Manhattan computer repair store Tekserve in the days before Apple and its Genius Bars took over.
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Lucy Barton — the redoubtable memoirist we've met in two previous novels — returns in Elizabeth Strout's Oh William!, reconnecting with her estranged first husband after her second husband dies.